What To Do When Your Printer's Waste Ink Tray Container Is Full

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Recently, our printer closed up shop and refused to work any more. With any ordinary printer, that's no big deal. Junk it, get a new one. But in this case, there's been a fair investment above and beyond it's initial cost. We bought it with a Continuous Ink System from Inkproducts.com, and those tend to be custom designed for specific printers. I didn't want to throw all that out and start again. Lucky for me, Monique is a powerhouse when it comes to solving problems.

The printer's message screen read "Service Required. Contact Epson." She did a little research, and found out the problem. The printer (an Epson Stylus Photo R380) has a chip that counts waste ink use. When it hits a magic number, it decides the waste ink tray must be full, and turns itself off until an Epson tech can change the tray and reactivate the chip.

While I'm using a very specific printer here, the principle holds true for other inkjet printers. InkProducts offers solutions for a huge number of printers, if you're having any printer problem, it's worth seeing what printers they currently cover.

Her next step was to find out what to do about it.  Turns out, Inkproducts has the answer for that.  What a cool company... they're like hackers for printers.  Anyway, they offer an Ink Waste Container Kit.  Costs about $15, including shipping.  Considering how much that printer already cost, fifteen dollars was a much better option than buying a new printer.  So Monique ordered the kit.

It arrived pretty quickly.  Everything looked very clean and simple.  As usual, they included a very nice set of instructions with full-color photographs.  I'm not very good with practical skills, but this was clear enough even I could do it.  As a matter of fact, the video below?  I made that on the fly while working through the instructions for the first time ever.  Yet it went so well, you'd almost think I knew what I was talking about...

The installation went quick and easy.  Before I knew it, there was a tube hanging out of the printer, going to an empty bottle.  Before now, it never occurred to me to wonder about waste ink.  I mean, I knew the head cleaner forced ink through that got wasted, but for regular printing?  I guess I always thought the printer only sprayed out what it needed.  But no, there's a surprising amount of ink that gets wasted.  Not like you could float a boat in it or anything, but still.  When you've always thought there was NO wasted ink, it's a bit of a shock to realize, yes, there is.  

At this point, the waste ink kit has been installed about 2 weeks. And there's around 1/4 inch of ink in the bottle. It's a shame to lose it, but the instructions are very clear. Do NOT re-use the wasted ink. It'll harm your computer. This would also be a good time to point out the removable cap on the bottle. Once full, you can take off the cap, throw away the ink, and reattach the empty bottle. Then you're ready to keep printing.

This has been an excellent printer for us, and has seen heavy use. I'm glad there was a good, practical, solution to get it running again. And I'm glad it was so easy to install. Once all the physical stuff is done, then there's a link to get the software from. Epson has released the program that resets the counter, so Inkproducts just gives you a link to the right place. I understand that for other printers, Inkproducts provides the software as part of their kit.

To see the software installation and use, watch the video below.

Download the program, run it, and next thing you know, the printer is working just fine. For me, anyway. I have to give the ink waste container kit a big thumbs up. It was affordable, easy, and saved my printer!

One small caveat - On the instructions, it very specifically tells you to read all of the instructions, and that there is no refund or exchange on this product. I can understand why. But as simple as the job was, I don't see that being a problem.

There's a video just below showing me install the ink waste container kit on my first run through the instructions. If you'd rather see it with text and pictures, just keep reading:

Now you're done installing the hardware, it's time to follow the online link and download the software. Be sure to watch the video above for this procedure.

Once again, the link to this great company is:

Inkproducts.com

I would like to note, they have no affiliate program, and are not paying me for this recommendation.  I use their products personally, and think they do a great job!